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When a friend from business school rang to ask David Stevens if he would like to start a company, “I said yes before he told me what it was going to be,” Stevens recalls of Henry Engelhardt’s proposition, “partly because I knew we’d complement each other but partly because I knew he was going to run a company that I’d like to work for.” And so corporate culture was part of the blueprint of Cardiff-based insurer Admiral Group from the outset.

The pair wrote the startup’s business plan together, co-founding it in 1993. “We set out to achieve something different,” says Stevens, who took over as chief executive in 2016 when Engelhardt stepped down — signing off with a £1,000 parting gift to every employee. “Both of us had been working for companies that didn’t prioritise staff happiness or work-life balance. We were in our late twenties, early thirties, he had a young family. You want to get home at 6.30pm — you don’t want this macho competition to see who can be the last out of the door.”

Describing Engelhardt as “a brilliant thinker and a real innovator in terms of culture”, Stevens says he has benefited “hugely” from the foundations his predecessor put in place. The handover of leadership has, from an employee engagement perspective, been seamless, as evidenced by Admiral Group topping our list of the 25 Best Big Companies to Work For this year. And Stevens has won the Best Big Companies Best Leader award for the second time.

The company has mushroomed from 57 employees to a staff of more than 7,100 along the M4 corridor linking Cardiff, Newport and Swansea in south Wales. With international operations including offices in America, Mexico and Spain, Admiral’s global workforce numbers 10,000-plus, marketing insurance products and loans to nearly 5m customers. Stevens predicts “More of the same, why not?” for the future: “more employees, more customers.”

A preference for promoting managers from within has been crucial to maintaining company culture during this extraordinary growth. “It’s about making sure you recruit people who have the same values, who then recruit people who have the same values,” Stevens says.

At Admiral every day is a dress-down day and office breakout areas come with ping-pong tables and games consoles. Fun? There’s a dedicated “ministry” for that, taken over by a different department monthly, each aiming to outdo the previous one by coming up with ever more imaginative ways of raising a smile during the working day, from circulating cat videos to staff quizzes and fancy dress. Charity fundraising is similarly ingrained.

There is method to the fun and games. “Insurance is a complicated business, and the longer people stay with us the better they are at their job. One advantage of people enjoying being engaged is we have really good retention. It’s hard for someone to steal our best people,” explains Stevens.

He insists the high level of staff engagement has been good for business: “Some people go to work indifferent to how well their company does, it’s just a way of paying the bills. Our staff are genuinely interested in how well the company does.” It is doing very well. Admiral Group announced record pre-tax profits of £405m for the year ending 2017. Since floating on the stock market in 2004, every employee has been gifted shares twice a year, worth around £75,000 to date to a frontline employee.

Stevens is confident that sharing success reaps rewards all round. “When shareholders ask what is the secret of our success, it’s very difficult to give a one-sentence answer, but I would certainly put culture at the top of the list,” he says. And with a share price that in 10 years “roughly increased by a factor of four”, they have nothing to argue about.

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February 24 2019

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